Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition

In 2006, then-President George W. Bush officially acknowledged the existence of the secret CIA Enhanced Interrogation program. Between the attacks of September 11 and Bush's announcement, the CIA had been shuttling suspected terrorists and “persons of interest” around the world in order to detain and interrogate them at black site facilities, the details and locations of which remain classified to this day. By interrogating the sovereign claims of American power and the architectural spaces of its secret prisons, Spaces of Disappearance traces the multiple spatial manifestations of the so-called War on Terror and attempts to reconstruct sites, subjects, and histories that have been rendered intentionally abstract and beyond representation. Jordan H. Carver compiles an original archive of architectural representations, redacted documents, and media reports to build a frightening, if knowingly incomplete, spatial history of post-9/11 extraordinary rendition. Framed with an introductory essay by architectural historian and theorist Felicity D. Scott, Spaces of Disappearance shows how architectures of confinement were designed to deny prisoners their human subjectivity and describes how the spectacle of government bureaucracy is used as a substitute for accountability. "Carver does not show us torture, killing, or illegal detention but the attempt to mask, redact, and obfuscate these crimes. In this book, “negative evidence”—the withdrawal of evidence—operates as evidence in its own right." Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture "From the uncertain sovereign spaces of Guantanamo Bay to the prefabricated metal cells that are used to house detainees at black sites, to the globally disbursed architecture of torture and disappearance, this book's focus on extraordinary rendition illuminates the uneven spatio-temporal distributions of power and violence" Laleh Khalili, Author of Time in the Confinement in Counterinsurgencies